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see also:- Micron - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com and Micron's SSD page | |||
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| Micron moved up 4 places in the Top SSD Companies List - Q1 2013 edition | |||
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re Micron and SSDs - by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - January 2013 Overriding all previous faltering (and sometimes misdirected) steps taken by Micron in the SSD market in recent years - the company's 2 biggest legacy achievements in the SSD market upto now were clearly revealed in 2012. They were:-
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| Who's who in SSD? - by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - June 2012 Micron sampled its 1st SSD products in early 2008 and made its first appearance in the Top 20 SSD Companies list in Q3 2010. But the company dropped out of the list again in the most recent edition of the top SSD companies (Q1 2012). I spoke to Ed Doller, VP of Enterprise SSD Solutions recently to discuss their enterprise SSD products. I had been following up a chain of SSD contacts within the company - and I was looking forward to finally getting some useful information about their enterprise SSDs. I started by saying that I was surprised that the information which is publicly available on Micron's enterprise SSD web pages - lacks the essential data that any serious designer would need to know in order to decide whether to shortlist Micron as a possible supplier. At the time I looked (in May 2012) the PCIe SSD product datasheets - for example - didn't say anything at all about the internal architecture - and they were light on many performance details too. I wondered if I had been looking in the right places. To me Micron's enterprise SSD web pages gave me a message of product intentions rather than products which were in production and had been fully characterized. It wasn't me. I learned that's just the way they do things. Ed Doller said that the company doesn't supply the kind of detailed internal architecture information I was asking for unless they are talking directly to a potential customer which they have identified by their sales efforts and even in those cases the prospects (mostly in the top tier of computer oems) would need to sign an NDA first. I said Micron's approach - witholding even the most basic technical info - showed me that Micron doesn't know how to market enterprise SSDs and that unless Micron changes the way they presented their SSD info online they would miss out on a big chunk of the enterprise market. I said my readers include the biggest buyers and specifiers of SSDs and that with so many vendors in the enterprise SSD market - the designers tend to shortlist suppliers from what they see online - because they don't have time to talk to everyone or test more than a small number of different products. Neither Micron nor anyone else can compile a list of who the biggest SSD users are based on traditional sales data. Because there are many companies which will be huge consumers of enterprise SSDs in the online data economy which fall outside the traditional prospects lists. These SSD users will make the first moves to choose their SSD partners - not the other way around. I said it's a valid business decision to do business the way Micron was doing it. But to my way of thinking marketing enterprise SSDs the same way as commodity memory products - wasn't the way to maximize their business potential. One of these days I will have to read some blogs about diplomacy. I thought we weren't getting anywhere but Ed Doller did confirm that they have designed their own SSD controller architecture for use in their enterprise SSDs. And to me - it's a safe inference is that they are also in the DSP IP in SSD pack too. That means Micron is a more significant SSD IP company than you would think simply by looking at the null data content in their SSD web pages. If you're thinking of designing in Micron's enterprise SSDs - I would say - don't waste too much of your time visiting Micron's web site - because you won't learn anything useful there. They don't have a scalable online process of disseminating the information you need. You'll need to talk to a real person in their SSD business - and then wait weeks or months - depending how busy they are - to talk to a product specialist who can answer the type of detailed technical questions - which real enterprise SSD companies put in their public web pages. (I'm still waiting to get my questions answered - and when I hear I'll let you know.) But to get the balance right Micron isn't the only semiconductor company which doesn't know how to market systems products. That kind of thinking is built into the DNA of many chip makers. These antiquated oem component oriented ways of developing business worked well in the past - but the SSD market isn't like the PC or server market. One of the interesting things about the SSD market is how the memory makers, and the traditional storage companies have very different approaches to each other and also to the pure play SSD companies. There's no right and wrong way. It's whatever gets the business to the next level. But if you're selecting an SSD supplier - then these differences in thinking and doing business and risk management can be more important than the exact specs and prices of the products. Another positive thing about Micron - is thatall the SSD people I spoke to were very enthusiastic about the enterprise SSD market and optimistic about the advantages Micron had in the SSD business - by being part of a memory company. They were surprised but not at all offended when I said that it was only an advantage if everything worked out right - but that the advantage of not being tied to a particular memory supplier for designers in competing SSD companies was that they could go with whichever memory product looked best at the time. I think we'll be hearing a lot more from Micron - but other enterprise PCIe SSD makers won't be putting them at the top of their list of competitors to worry about just yet. For competing SSD suppliers see these directories:- PCIe SSDs, 2.5" SSDs and SATA SSDs. Micron recently acquired the assets of UK based Virtensys which marketed rackmount SSDs stuffed with Micron's PCIe SSDs with a patented multi-server sharing virtualization interface. The leading companies in the enterprise acceleration PCIe SSD market which Micron has to compete with are:- Fusion-io, Texas Memory Systems, OCZ and Virident Systems. And in the next level down are:- STEC and LSI and then another 40 or so other companies. It's a crowded market - but there's a lot to play for. Micron is also in the consumer SSD market. I told Micron's SSD marketers right at the outset of our talks that I wasn't interested in discussing that aspect of their business because StorageSearch.com isn't a consumer facing SSD site. ...Later:- in an interview with another PCIe SSD company (July 24, 2012) I was asked - what do I think will happen to the PCIe SSD market? Will it eventually be dominated by the semiconductor companies? like Micron and Intel - To find out what I said - ...read the article | |||
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In April 2008 - Micron and Nanya Technology announced they were each investing $550 million in cash in a new joint venture. In November 2008 - Micron demonstrated prototypes of fast PCIe flash SSDs with 800MB/s throughput, and hinted that 1GB/s SSDs could be available soon. The performance itself (for a prototype) is unremarkable - because 3 other oems already ship flash SSDs with similar (or faster) performance as commercial products. Z's Laws - Predicting Future Flash SSD Performance In February 2009 - Micron announced restructuring plans will reduce employment at their Idaho sites by approximately 500 employees in the near term and as many as 2,000 positions by the end of the company's fiscal year. In July 2009 - IDT announced it was working with Micron to develop a commercial PCIe flash SSD for the server market. Micron had previously tested market reaction by unveiling a prototype PCIe SSD (with 800MB/s R/W speeds) in November 2008. In December 2009 - Micron announced it is sampling 6Gbps SATA MLC SSDs in 1.8" and 2.5" form factors. Micron's C300 SSD can achieve a read throughput speed of up to 355MB/s and a write throughput up to 215MB/s. Editor's comments:- Long anticipated in StorageSearch.com's flash SSD Roadmap - it was inevitable that we would be seeing 6Gbps SATA SSDs soon, because several companies have already sampled 6Gbps SAS SSDs which use the same physical interface. It was simply a question of when vendors would judge the market conditions right. In February 2010 -Micron announced an agreement to acquire privately held Numonyx in an all-stock transaction worth approximately $1.3 billion. This strengthens Micron's position as one of the world's leading memory companies, with a broad portfolio of DRAM, NAND and NOR memory products. Analyst comment:- from Objective Analysis - "By acquiring Numonyx, Micron is buying the current leader in the NOR flash market - which has been a difficult one for nearly all participants. Leaders Numonyx and Spansion have suffered losses for several years, with Spansion recently turning a profit through a strategy largely focused upon markets for low-density parts used by markets outside of cell handsets, the largest consumer of NOR flash. Micron itself participated in NOR starting in the late 1990s, but abandoned this effort in 2006." In August 2010 - Micron Technology announced it is sampling the RealSSD P300 - a 200GB 2.5" SATA 3 SLC flash SSD with R/W IOPS of 44,000 and 16,000 respectively. Micron's new P300 SSD sounds almost exactly the same as the C300 SSD the company said it was sampling in December 2009. The main differences are:- the newer product has lower R/W IOPS, and is SLC instead of MLC - which is better for most mission critical apps. In June , 2011 - 30 months after pre-announcing its intentions to enter the PCIe SSD accelerator market - Micron today announced it is sampling the first products in a new family which will ship in the 3rd quarter of this year. The company says its RealSSD P320h drive delivers upto 750K / 341K R/W IOPS, and 3GB/s / 2GB/s R/W throughput. It uses Micron's own 34nm SLC ONFI 2.1 NAND flash and has on-board RAM cache. Micron says it manufactures most of the chips used in the new cards a customized SSD controller. In January 2012 - Micron announced it has acquired the assets UK based Virtensys which marketed rackmount SSDs stuffed with Micron's PCIe SSDs and supported by a patented multi-server sharing virtualization interface. In January 2013 - Micron disclosed that in the past quarter SSDs had become 17% of Micron's nand business and the company estimates that 35% of the nand flash it supplies to trade customers end up in SSDs. | |||
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| the 2.5"
PCIe SSD guide Aren't all PCIe SSDs very similar? Does size matter in SSD design? What do enterprise SSD users want? sugaring nand flash for the enterprise an introduction to enterprise SSD silos How will hard drives fare in an SSD world? | ||||||
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Where are we now with SSD software? the New Business Case for SSD ASAPs How fast can your SSD run backwards? the Problem with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs Where does all the money go? (inside SSDs) Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design How will 2.5 inch PCIe express SSDs change things? Why can't SSD's true believers agree about architecture? | ||||||
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